Due to Microsoft’s recent ban of modified Xbox 360s from Xbox Live, used consoles are now crowded in online auction forums and community classified listings. The systems were modified to play duplicated game discs, and last week Microsoft severed the connection to Xbox’s online community, which includes online game playability, game downloads, Netflix streaming and much more.

The ban of the “small percentage” of modded consoles on the network could amount to 600,000 or even a million players, depending on the source. With such a substantial population, it is less than surprising that sites like Craigslist and eBay are having a category shift from previous-generation consoles and b-list game lots to results such as “Xbox 360 banned from live with games - $100″ or “Year Old Modded Xbox 360 w/ cables - $125.”

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Internet Retailer has posted a very comprehensive overview of the state of mobile commerce, which anyone interested in the sector should definitely read.

Culling data from a lot of sources, the Internet Retailer report provides a deep snapshot of the market.

North American mobile commerce sales will reach $750 million this year (ABI Research), with a lot of that money going to EBay, which has already pulled in $380 million in mobile commerce in the first three quarters of 2009.

EBay is also the leader in mobile visitors, with 5.4 million unique monthly visitors in August (Nielsen). Following it are Amazon (3.5 million), Gamespot (2.5 million) Fandango (2.4 million) and Netflix (2.3 million).

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Al Gore (see picture) spent the whole week at the TED Conference, doing some heavy lobbying to launch Repower America (http://repoweramerica.org/), the ad campaign done by his Foundation, the Alliance For Climate Protection (www.climateprotect.org). His goal: One hundred percent Green Electricity in America in ten years. And he is really good selling it. He went on stage once, spent his time in the conference room listening, ran one-on-one meetings and held a lobbying breakfast for the very happy few on Friday. I was lucky enough to be invited along with John Doer and his wife, Glenn Close, Cameron Diaz, Yann Arthus-Bertrand, Niklas Z enstrom of Skype, Larry Page, Jeff Skoll of eBay, and a few more discreet but powerful and wealthy people. Al Gore is here to spread the world, to listen to people, and to make sure that all these opinion leaders (celebrities, entrepreneurs, scientists, etc.) are with him. Because he is smart, he knows that these intelligent, powerful egos want to express themselves. So most of the time is dedicated to listening to good, and less good, ideas from the attendees.

The Alliance has a budget of $300 million, with $200 million already raised. And they are going to spend fifty million of them in an advertising campaign in the US. Al Gore loves the video clips of the campaign, and he spends his time running them for the audience. I must say that they are really well done. Some of them have been refused by major networks like ABC, because they were a little bit to explicit…a shame.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about eBay for the last couple of days. Not that I have anything to buy or sell, but I’ve been perversely intrigued about the auction site’s dramatic fall in 2008. Sure, last year was rough for everyone, but for this former giant, it was especially bad.

This week it was announced that eBay’s Q4 profits had fallen 31 percent, the San Jose, Calif., company’s first decline since 1995, when many – if not most – people weren’t even on the Web.

The major reason given for this is eBay’s shift of focus to fixed-price sales. Auction sales are declining and fixed-price sales are losing to Amazon and niche retailers.

The Internet accelerates the changes in consumer behavior, and part of eBay’s difficulty lies in this. Online auctions, once a novelty, are now a hassle; not only that, they’re not even sure to offer the best prices anymore.

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Shopping on the internet brings great deals, but is very time consuming. During the holiday season, this problem is especially apparent. The specific gift is often entrenched in pages upon pages of search results or similar products. Given that 4 out of 5 adults have made an online transaction in the past 6 months, it appears PicClick has prudently developed software to circumvent the time issue.

With PicClick.com, search results from Amazon and Ebay are consolidated into a single scroll down page of icons that include the picture, part of the headline, and the price of the item. For Ebay searches, the results also include the auction ending time. For example, here are the results for the search phrase “Ovation Celebrity,” a guitar that I am looking to buy.

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78% of US online adults made an Internet purchase in the past six months, according to Nielsen.

Four out of ten made a travel purchase, and more than one third managed their credit card or baking accounts online. Other sites with high transaction rates were clothes/shoes/accessories (28%), books (26%), and hotel/motel reservations (18%). Top individual sites were eBay, Amazon, Wal Mart stores, Target, and Netflix.

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With the worsening economy and state budget deficits, states are increasingly considering adding sales tax to online retail transactions. Legislation could be implemented as soon as 2009, according to Forbes.

“States are coming up with huge deficits and looking for places to make money,” says Eric Menhart of CyberLaw. “All of a sudden, Internet taxation appears a lot more viable.”

The legislation will be introduced as soon as January; if passed, changes could be implemented within six months. It is estimated that these taxes would generate several billion dollars in revenue: the Streamlined Sales Tax Governing Board (SSTGB) estimates that uncollected sales tax revenue was between $19 and $27 billion in 2006.

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China is enforcing a 20 percent tax on virtual goods, a $1.45 billion (10 billion yuan) a year market.  The measure “specifically takes aim at those who buy virtual currency from gamers and surfers and sell it to others at a mark-up”.

The tax specifically targets “gold farmers”, who collect in-game items in order to sell them at a mark-up. Characters, spells, and items can be sold for thousands of dollars on eBay and other auction sites.

A study by Manchester University this year estimates that gold farming is a $500 million industry. 80 percent of that industry, 400,000 people, is based in China.

Legislation of the virtual world is becoming increasingly complex.

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For a long time, people thought Silicon Valley was recession proof. The last two weeks have made it apparent that that is not the case. At least dozens of tech companies - including Adbrite, eBay, Zillow, Pandora - have announced layoffs in October, most of them in the last two weeks.

“The next big thing in IT is not a technology — it is cost reduction, risk management and compliance,” said Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard. Gartner projects budget cuts of up to 20% at some companies.

Yahoo! is expected to cut more jobs than initially announced in January; that announcement could come as early as today. The cuts are expected to cost more than 1000 jobs.

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An Internet censorship specialist revealed on Wednesday that TOM-Skype, the Chinese partnership of eBay’s Skype, is monitoring and storing text chats. Skype is a widely used messaging and voice chat service that identifies itself as being secure for communication due to its encryption technology. China’s government set keywords to flag messages on the service, where they would be analyzed for IP addresses and usernames. This information was stored insecurely, leading to its discovery by Canadian researcher Nart Villeneuve at the University of Toronto.

“Skype encryption ensures that no other party can eavesdrop on your call or read your instant messages.” says their security page , but has a policy of responding to “lawful requests from relevant authorities.”  The FBI wants telephone tapping laws on communication services like Skype, but these do not apply to instant text messages that skip the phone system entirely. The Chinese version of Skype allows surveillance of messages with flagged keywords, some of which include “democracy” and “Tibet.”

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